Let's figure out which of these may need to be kept for plugin use... Icons and pure design elements don't matter much if they disappear even if used, but things used for actions might need to stay. For example, spinners, xit, maybe stars, sort, resize, etc.

Plugins like baw-better-admin-color-themes are just going to break anyway in 3.8 because of MP6ification, so ...

PLUGIN TYPE

COUNT

uses an image

116

edits admin

9

breaking plugin repo rules

10

The ones that edit admin are the ones that need an overhaul anyway, so I don't really give a durn about them. The security plugins I don't even bother with since, hullo, they'll cope. They have to update every new release anyway. The breaking rules are calling an image from their servers, I'll apply a hammer in a bit.

116 plugins out of 28,000 is ... what .03%?

Actually I think spinner's fine to toss. Only showed up five times. o.O

IMAGE

COUNT

xit*

105

spinner

5

menu.png

29

arrows*

151

media-*

241

Mind, xit almost triples when we count the themeing admin plugins and the scanners.

I would like to remove the following for 3.8, and remove the rest of that list in 3.9 to give people a chance to catch up. The only one I don't think we can remove from that list is wp-includes/images/rss-2x.png. The ones I took off the list were things like action indicators and our former-style icons for the pointers, menu, toolbar, and TinyMCE. Ipstenu's list doesn't show a ton of use of those icons, but I'd like to play it safe since this was such a short cycle.

Based on @helen's latest list of proposed images for removal, I ran a scan of the plugins repository for image use.

My search method differs from @Ipstenu's in that I initially checked for the "images/$image.ext" name (omittingwp-admin and wp-includes from the path). That way I could pick up usages such as:

admin_url('images/image.png')

admin_url() . 'images/image.png'

includes_url('images/image.png')

includes_url() . 'images/image.png'

site_url() . WPINC . '/images/image.png'

Admin-relative links when the context is within the admin (e.g. "../images/image.png")

And of course the full site relative path as used in the list

Files checked were *.(php|css|js|less).

I excluded:

The following plugins (security and admin theming plugins that have matches but will have to update anyhow): baw-better-admin-color-themes, easy-admin-color-schemes, exploit-scanner, foundation-verify-install, jw-cloud-sites-wp-scanner, total-security, ultimate-security-checker

Repository violators referencing these images on some external site

Plugins packaging the image(s) and merely referencing their own copy

The table below summarizes the results, with each image name, the number of times it is used overall (including multiple uses by one plugin) and a count of the number of unique plugins utilizing the image.

Image file

# Uses

# Plugins

wp-admin/images/arrows-dark-2x.png

2

2

wp-admin/images/arrows-dark-vs-2x.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/arrows-dark-vs.png

3

2

wp-admin/images/arrows-dark.png

12

8

wp-admin/images/arrows-pr-2x.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/arrows-pr.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/arrows-vs-2x.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/arrows-vs.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/arrows.png

81

46

wp-admin/images/bubble_bg-2x.gif

1

1

wp-admin/images/bubble_bg-rtl-2x.gif

0

0

wp-admin/images/bubble_bg-rtl.gif

1

1

wp-admin/images/bubble_bg.gif

28

10

wp-admin/images/comment-grey-bubble-2x.png

1

1

wp-admin/images/comment-grey-bubble.png

52

34

wp-admin/images/date-button-2x.gif

2

2

wp-admin/images/date-button.gif

26

20

wp-admin/images/generic.png

21

12

wp-admin/images/menu-shadow-rtl.png

2

2

wp-admin/images/menu-shadow.png

5

4

wp-admin/images/press-this-2x.png

1

1

wp-admin/images/press-this.png

5

5

wp-admin/images/stars-rtl-2x.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/stars-rtl.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/welcome-icons-2x.png

1

1

wp-admin/images/welcome-icons.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/wordpress-logo-2x.png

4

4

wp-admin/images/wp-badge-2x.png

2

2

wp-admin/images/wp-badge.png

4

4

wp-admin/images/wp-logo-2x.png

1

1

wp-admin/images/wp-logo-vs-2x.png

0

0

wp-admin/images/wp-logo-vs.png

2

2

wp-admin/images/wp-logo.png

9

8

wp-includes/images/wpmini-blue-2x.png

1

1

wp-includes/images/wpmini-blue.png

6

5

Total number of affected plugins: 130

The above stats may include a few plugins that are currently closed. I'll update the list once I run a check for that.

Remove many of the now-unused images in core. Some images have been left for now, notably our previous style icons, action indicators, and images that see a higher frequency of use in plugins to allow them more time to adapt to the new design. props ocean90, Ipstenu, coffee2code. fixes #26036.